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In celebration of the 200th anniversary of Amherst College, a group of scholars and alumni explore the school’s substantial past in this volume. Amherst in the World tells the story of how an institution that was founded to train Protestant ministers began educating new generations of industrialists, bankers, and political leaders with the decline in missionary ambitions after the Civil War. The contributors trace how what was a largely white school throughout the interwar years begins diversifying its student demographics after World War II and the War in Vietnam. The histories told here illuminate how Amherst has contended with slavery, wars, religion, coeducation, science, curriculum, t...
Hypertext is now commonplace: links and linking structure nearly all of our experiences online. Yet the literary, as opposed to commercial, potential of hypertext has receded. One of the few tools still focused on hypertext as a means for digital storytelling is Twine, a platform for building choice-driven stories without relying heavily on code. In Twining, Anastasia Salter and Stuart Moulthrop lead readers on a journey at once technical, critical, contextual, and personal. The book's chapters alternate careful, stepwise discussion of adaptable Twine projects, offer commentary on exemplary Twine works, and discuss Twine's technological and cultural background. Beyond telling the story of Twine and how to make Twine stories, Twining reflects on the ongoing process of making. "While there have certainly been attempts to study Twine historically and theoretically... no single publication has provided such a detailed account of it. And no publication has even attempted to situate Twine amongst its many different conversations and traditions, something this book does masterfully." --James Brown, Rutgers University, Camden
Public Scholarship in Literary Studies demonstrates that literary criticism has the potential not only to explain, but to actively change our terms of engagement with current realities. Rachel Arteaga and Rosemary Johnsen bring together accomplished public scholars who make significant contributions to literary scholarship, teaching, and the public good. The volume begins with essays by scholars who write regularly for large public audiences in primarily digital venues, then moves to accounts of research-based teaching and engagement in public contexts, and finally turns to important new models for cross-institutional partnerships and campus-community engagement. Grounded in scholarship and ...
While all history has the potential to be political, public history is uniquely so: public historians engage in historical inquiry outside the bubble of scholarly discourse, relying on social networks, political goals, practices, and habits of mind that differ from traditional historians. Radical Roots: Public History and a Tradition of Social Justice Activism theorizes and defines public history as future-focused, committed to the advancement of social justice, and engaged in creating a more inclusive public record. Edited by Denise D. Meringolo and with contributions from the field’s leading figures, this groundbreaking collection addresses major topics such as museum practices, oral his...
Netprov is an emerging interdisciplinary digital art form that offers a literature-based “show” of insightful, healing satire that is as deep as the novels of the past. This accessible history of Netprov emerges out of an ongoing conversation about the changing roles and power dynamics of author and reader in an age of real-time interactivity. Rob Wittig describes a literary genre in which all the world is a platform and all participants are players. Beyond serving as a history of the genre, this book includes tips and examples to help those new to the genre teach and create netprovs. “Jargon-free and ambitious in scope, Netprov meets the needs of several types of readers. Casual readers will be met with straightforward and easy-to-follow definitions and examples. Scholars will find deep wells of in- formation about networked roleplay games. Teachers and students will find instructions for how-to play, and a ready-made academic context to make their play meaningful and memorable.” —Kathi Inman Berens, Portland State University
What goes on in a college classroom? For all that has been written in recent years about higher education very little attention has been paid to the heart of the matter: teaching. This book, by members of the Amherst College faculty, helps to repair that oversight. Amherst, in defining itself, places a large emphasis, as it should, on the life of the classroom. No faculty member, no matter how senior, is "excused" from teaching; no cadre of graduate students shoulders the load of introductory courses. To teach is the central mission of an Amherst professor. But seldom the only mission. Almost everyone who teaches at Amherst also pursues research. Maintaining the balance is sometimes frustrat...
Struggling Upward reconsiders the rise and maturation of the modern novel in Japan by connecting the genre to new discourses on ambition and social mobility. Collectively called risshin shusse, these discourses accompanied the spread of industrial capitalism and the emergence of a new nation-state in the archipelago. Drawing primarily on historicist strategies of literary criticism, the book situates the Meiji novel in relation to a range of texts from different culturally demarcated zones: the visual arts, scandal journalism, self-help books, and materials on immigration to the colonies, among others. Timothy J. Van Compernolle connects these Japanese materials to topics of broad theoretical interest within literary and cultural studies, including imperialism, gender, modernity, novel studies, print media, and the public sphere. As the first monograph to link the novel to risshin shusse, Struggling Upward argues that social mobility is the privileged lens through which Meiji novelists explored abstract concepts of national belonging, social hierarchy, and the new space of an industrializing nation.
In 1863, just a year after Congress enacted the Land-Grant Colleges Act, Massachusetts Agricultural College embarked on its mission to offer instruction to the state's citizens in the agricultural, mechanical, and military arts. The school boasted a faculty of 4 and a student body of 56. As UMass Amherst celebrates its sesquicentennial in 2013, its full-time faculty numbers nearly 1,200 and the combined undergraduate/graduate student population is close to 28,000. The principles that undergirded Mass Aggie's founding continue to form the basis for UMass Amherst's mission of preparing young people to make their way in life by stretching boundaries in all disciplines, from the physical and soc...
"The sale of authors' papers to archives has become big news, with collections from James Baldwin and Arthur Miller fetching record-breaking sums in recent years. Amy Hildreth Chen offers the history of how this multimillion dollar business developed from the mid-twentieth century onward and considers what impact authors, literary executors, agents, and rare book dealers have had on this burgeoning economy. The market for contemporary authors' archives began when research libraries needed to cheaply provide primary sources for the swelling number of students and faculty following World War II. Demand soon grew, and while writers and their families found new opportunities to make money, so too did book dealers and literary agents with the foresight to pivot their businesses to serve living authors. Public interest surrounding celebrity writers had exploded by the late twentieth century, and as Placing Papers illustrates, even the best funded institutions were forced to contend with the facts that acquiring contemporary literary archives had become cost prohibitive and increasingly competitive"--
For twenty years, Ilan Stavans has been translating poetry from Spanish, Yiddish, Hebrew, French, Portuguese, Russian, German, Georgian, and other languages. His versions of Borges, Neruda, Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz, Ferreira Gullar, Raúl Zurita, and dozens of others have become classics. This volume, which includes poems from more than forty poets from all over the world, is testimony to a life dedicated to the pursuit of beauty through poetry in different languages. “Lightning from the Stable” by Elizabeth Schön (Venezuela, 1921–2007) You don’t choose the abyss, the chaos, the nothingness They reach you in water running slowly for you not to be surprised by the absence of matter around you near the light of the soul calling the wing’s passing flap of the earth you live in.